


Alone on a wide wide sea

by elentari7



Series: The first rule of flying [6]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Universe - Firefly Setting, Gen, Non-Linear Narrative, This is where the unfun Firefly stuff comes in I guess, Visions
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-06
Updated: 2020-11-06
Packaged: 2021-03-08 17:55:41
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,595
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27420814
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/elentari7/pseuds/elentari7
Summary: Sometime 2522, POV Sam.Sam wanders.
Relationships: Castiel & Sam Winchester, Sam Winchester & the whole gang
Series: The first rule of flying [6]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/284175
Kudos: 4





	Alone on a wide wide sea

**Author's Note:**

> CW for Firefly-canon-typical psychological results of human experimentation, including memory loss, hallucinated violence, implied death as a result of human experimentation, and an early-Supernatural-canon-typical request to be killed if one becomes dangerous.

Sometimes it’s still difficult to think in straight lines.

Other times, Sam feels like the only person in the ’verse who’s thinking in a straight line, and everyone else is just convinced otherwise.

What seems hardest for them to get is that just because he doesn’t always experience things in the right sequence, doesn’t mean he loses anything. He experiences _more_ than them, he knows. Granted, some days have sharper outlines than others, but that’s just a question of different kinds of experience. They can only measure him by the kind they’re used to.

Not that he wants this. He’s only ever wanted to be normal. Well, no, he’s wanted to be extraordinary at being normal...look where that got him. 

(No one’s sure where that’s got him. He certainly couldn’t explain.)

The physical where, he knows. Impala is one of the only things he’s always sure of these days.

People are harder. He knows more about them than he did before. It might be interesting if it weren’t terrifying--if he understood it. If he controlled it. But it’s always vague, never predictable, swells and ebbs like an erratic sea. Sometimes he walks into a room and Charlie’s presence--he hardly knows her, but she hides so little--slaps him in the face. Sometimes he looks at Jo, whom he’s known since he was a kid, and sees next to nothing. Sometimes it’s the other way around. 

Sometimes he says things he knows are true just by standing next to someone, and it’s never very specific, but it always unsettles. On days like that, he tries not to talk. Sometimes it’s like drowning in the waves coming off everyone, and it whites everything else out, and he can’t. He seals himself away in the secret compartments, or in the cockpit of his shuttle, where there’s no one but him and nothing but darkness. On days like that, Kevin has learned not to force proximity on him.

The worst, though, are the times when everything and everyone is in focus, glowing around the edges, their consciousnesses humming in the back of his mind, and he can talk almost like he used to and move almost like he used to and laugh and joke and his brother’s smile could blind him. Those are the worst times, because during them he is sharply aware that they’ll end. 

***

Benny is weathered and grey, like the steadiest of rocks, which is how people see him. But he’s got a mind the color of blood, and he knows it; it’s why he has to be like that on the outside. He can’t let any of it leak. He knows Sam knows, too. He doesn’t talk to Sam much.

***

Then there are the flashes.

He’s talking to Jo, nerding out about some rewiring on the control panel, just like old times, and he answers a question she didn’t ask--or rather, asked years and years ago, when both of them could barely see over the control panel and he didn’t know the answer.

Dean is about to head out to a drop point, and his head hurts so much, and he sees the trap closing. Sees the look his brother will wear when it closes. Says “ _Bad idea_.” Everyone hesitates, but he can’t describe how to spring the trap from the outside; he can’t see it again, no matter how much he tries.

They do learn that he sees bad ideas very accurately, though.

***

Sam likes Kevin. Part of it may be familiarity, he supposes, because of necessity they spend a lot of time together. He reminds Sam, slightly, of himself at university. The intellectual curiosity, the imprint of a life and a wariness he’s trying to hide, the radiating aura of being free for the first time and terrified with it. He’s a better person, though. Sam has ruined his life, and anger about that flickers inside him constantly, but it’s overwhelmed by how he feels about the people who made Sam his patient. And by helplessness. Kevin is not a psychologist, or equipped to deal with things that should be outside human ability. All he can ever do with Sam is try his best.

***

Jo glows with agitation around him, sometimes. She doesn’t know it. She’s very good at keeping it off her face. In a roundabout way, if he convinces himself enough, it’s sort of comforting; it’s the same familiar white-knuckled, scrape-kneed determination that has always, always been the core of her. She doesn’t know him anymore, and it unsettles her. But she is determined not to show it, and to know him again.

In his most normal stretches, it hits him how strange it is to see her grown. So he can kind of relate.

***

Meg has thorns. Sam doesn’t think she minds him knowing it so much as she minds him knowing she has anything besides that.

***

And there are things he sees that _don’t_ happen, that never have and never will, but it always feels like they’re real. He can never be sure.

He walks down into the cargo bay, and when he looks up the stairs are a frozen waterfall. Snow whispers down around him. The blanket of it on the floor gives everything that muffled, peaceful silence.

He looks at a plate in the kitchen and it shatters. He hits the floor, looks up, and people are staring at him. Nothing is broken.

He wakes in the middle of the night and Jess is there, smiling at him. She smiles and smiles and bleeds from the eyes. He strangles her without touching her. He watches from behind an invisible wall, screaming the whole time.

After that one Dean finds him, like he always does. Sam can see he’s scaring him. He must not have been on board long yet. He never wanted to let himself be consoled, back when they were younger; he wants to desperately now, and can’t. He does try. He begs Dean to console him, begs him over and over to kill him if he hurts someone, begs him to promise he’ll be stopped. 

Dean looks like his heart is being bitten into and ripped in half. He makes the promise.

He isn’t going to keep it.

***

Whenever he sees Jess, nowadays, he doesn’t mention it and takes himself off to be alone afterward. Everyone has mostly stopped being concerned when he disappears. It isn’t stranger than any of the other strange things he does. Jokes have been made about him melding into the ship, since a lot of the familiar hidey-holes won’t fit him anymore, but really he just moves to follow the quiet. He surprises himself by not moving when he perceives someone approaching and knows it’s Castiel.

In some ways, smooth and still and unfamiliar ways, Cas is difficult to read. It’s novel. Sort of relaxing.

“Hi,” he says without turning around. Cas’s footsteps pause. 

“I didn’t mean to intrude.” 

“You’re not an intrusion.” He waits a beat, and sure enough, Cas sits down next to him. “I just do this sometimes. Look for quiet.”

“I do as well,” Cas answers, and doesn’t ask anything. 

Maybe that’s why Sam tells him anyway. 

Cas doesn’t react when he tries to explain about power and imbalance and not understanding the things he can do, but not as if he’s not listening. He doesn’t move while Sam talks about fear, but not as if he doesn’t understand. He does Sam the courtesy of not looking at him when he gets out the first words he’s spoken aloud about Jess. The girl who had seen him no matter how many things he hid from her; the smartest person he knew; a font of unfamiliar warmth and optimism that only faltered after they graduated, after they were accepted into that program together, after they stopped remembering how long they’d been in that place. This, he doesn’t know if Castiel understands. 

Sam doesn’t remember what happened to her, is the worst part. She is gone and he knows it, and he doesn’t know how.

“I don’t even think I remember much of...what she was really like, these days,” he says, the words dragged out of him after he’s run out of anything else to say. “I don’t know.” After a few seconds, or possibly minutes, he adds, “Dean knows her name but that’s it. I can’t. I can’t even talk to my _brother_ about her.”

At this, Cas finally makes a minute movement. When he notices Sam looking at him, he seems surprised into talking. “That is difficult.”

Sam huffs out a not-quite-laugh of agreement, and there is more silence.

“It does not change how he feels about you.” Cas, to both their surprise, is the one to break the silence. “It wouldn’t if you told him, and it will not if you never do.”

Sam nods, because he knows, and is slow in responding. “Brotherhood’s important to you.”

That fact is _not_ difficult to read from Cas. Sam got it at their first meeting. But Cas himself actually looks surprised to hear it said. “I...haven't seen or spoken with my brothers in a while,” he says. “Longer than I'm used to.” He looks at Sam again, whose sudden unpredictable sadness must show on his face. “I do it willingly. There are some things you have to do alone.”

Sam bows his head, because he knows what that feels like, too. Though he also knows reality is never that simple.

They go back to looking for quiet, sitting side by side.

**Author's Note:**

> \- Gabriel and Charlie were supposed to be here too but I wrote this years ago and hadn't gotten around to them, oops.  
> \- And yeah titles are still all Out-of-Context Rime of the Ancient Mariner, all the time


End file.
